Arkham Detective Agency: A Lovecraftian-Noir Tribute to C. J. Henderson

by C. J. Henderson

  “I know who you are,” he said. “Don’t worry. I think everyone should have a shot at happiness. Come next Tuesday at midnight, and I’ll show you how to pick the world of your dreams.”

  I wasn’t a cop. I wasn’t a tough guy. I would have given him my grandmother at that point.

  The week passed. Every day I grew more suspicious. If something looks too good to be true, it is. I didn’t get much sleep. On Friday night I fell asleep in the van, and I had a dream. I saw Ms. Valetta falling on the sidewalk again. I ran to her again. But this time she wasn’t talking about detectives. She said, “I’m sorry I snagged you on the way out. Eihort could pick a world of your dreams, but He doesn’t. He picks a world of His dreams. Maybe he does it out of love, maybe out of hate. I don’t know.”

  I woke up ten minutes to the end of my shift. I was covered in sweat. Next week had Thanksgiving and the big game, and next week I had a chance at happiness or terror.

  It wasn’t an easy weekend. No more dreams. I followed Nardi’s advice and stayed grounded in the “real” world. I made arrangements to get off early on Tuesday night. I walked to the Church. I was on the third floor with the Star Trek girl again before I realized that I didn’t have an escape plan. There were fewer folks in the theater. Maybe eight or nine. The lights were low and it was hard to tell. The others were dropping checks in a coffer. I saw the old woman I had ridden with in the elevator before. What world would she pick? I sat down and they brought me punch. I mimed drinking it and set it under my seat. Dr. Phillips took the stage wearing a deep scarlet robe with angular designs on it. He told us to close our eyes and relax. Well I did close my eyes. He told me to picture our dream and, despite my better intentions, I did so. There she was! Nicole. My son, Robert (after my dad), our nice home. A plaque from the police department on the wall of my study. I couldn’t quite read it—its letters were reversed as though in a mirror. I could smell steaks in mushroom sauce. Nicole was handing me a glass of red wine. After Robert went to bed, she led me to our bedroom on the second floor. I stripped, she stripped. Clearly childbirth had not affected her great body. She lay down and I was ready. I moved toward her, but an errant thought drifted through my mind “He chooses worlds of His Dreams.”

  Suddenly Nicole became a squirming mass of the dark shadow rats I had seen eat Ms. Valetta. Our bed became a mound of what looked like frog eggs. The walls of the house were breathing. I could hear strange shrieks from the hall. One of the shadow rats attached itself to my mouth and ate past my lips. I could feel it dissolving my teeth and biting into my tongue.

  I woke up and Constance Valetta was astride me, French kissing me. She was wearing the black trench coat, but little else. But her eyes were wrong. They looked like a fly’s—then they were human. I felt a spark from her tongue and I had a brief moment of telepathic contact. I pushed her away and she spoke to me in the normal way, “It’s Ok, Travis. It’s better. I’m better, happier.”

  I saw that each of the others had someone kissing them. Most were man-woman pairings, but a man-man couple was behind me. Dr. Phillips (still on stage) said, “How the hell did he wake up?”

  I punched Constance and ran for the door. The elevator and the lobby were just a blur. I ran the six blocks to my apartment before I realized that I had left my coat behind. I locked and bolted the door, then pushed a bookshelf in front of it, then went to my bathroom and locked myself in there until the sun came up. I think I prayed the Lord’s Prayer about a hundred times. Not my best moment.

  The next day I found a note on my apartment door. It read “Go ahead, tell. You will be locked up.”

  I took the cab to the airport about six hours early. I never came back. I sent a letter to the landlord with a rent check for December and told him to give my stuff to Goodwill.

  I like it here. I eat better. I work hard. I sleep better. I’m a little bored sometimes. OK, I am super-bored. I told my sister that it was too sad to live in the same city as Nicole. She doesn’t believe me, but she pretends to. I love my sister.

  In that brief moment I could feel the mind of the “woman” above me, I heard one very clear thought. I think about it a lot.

  This is a nightmare world for us. This is where Eihort punishes us.

  CLEAR THE AIR

  Brian M. Sammons

  My name is Jordan.

  Wait; no, it’s not, but I’ve been Jordan for so long, it’s hard to remember back to when I was someone else. I even think of myself as Jordan now, when I’m not busy remembering to be someone else. Right now I’m Lester “Les” Parker out of New Jersey. At least that’s the fiction I’m playing, but underneath that, I’m still Jordan. Underneath that, who knows anymore?

  I am a CIA contractor. That is to say, I’m as CIA as any official agent, but should I get caught, killed or just mess up on assignment, Langley can wash their hands of me. There are no ties between me and the Agency, no trail; paper, cyber, or otherwise. I don’t exist on any database, in any records; thus the name Jordan. It’s just a tag, something the few people that know of me can call me other than “that guy” or “you know who.” It’s not a name that I picked; it was given to me because it could be a first or last name or belong to a man or a woman. It is meant to be like me: forgettable. Disposable. Despite what you see in movies, the best killers are not muscle-bound action heroes or creepy guys with scars, one eye missing, metal teeth, etc. To be successful in my line of work you have to be able to blend into the background and be easy to forget.

  Oh yeah, I am a killer, didn’t I tell you? I am surprisingly comfortable with that fact. No, I really am, I’m not just saying that to sound all stone-cold about it. It helps that I have a borderline sociopathic personality, or at least that’s what the psych evaluations said about me when I was inducted into the CIA’s Foundling Program all those years ago. That right there should tell you all you need to know about the CIA and their hiring practices, that someone with that (trait? flaw? disability?) would be desirable to them, but I digress. My lack of guilt over my profession is further helped along because I only kill bad people. I know, I know, you’re thinking that a lot of coldblooded killers must tell themselves that in order to sleep at night. You’re probably right, but in my case, it happens to be true.

  Well, most of the time.

  You see, I’m a bit of a specialist. Ever since a mission in Iraq (no, not in that war, the one before it) where I was the only one to come out alive and sane, I only hunt monsters and the madmen who make deals with them. And no, monsters isn’t a euphemism, I mean it: horrible, slimy, deadly and almost always pissed-off abominations from beyond space and time that defy description. You see, the world is a weirder and more dangerous place than the vast majority of people could ever imagine, but the government (all governments) is fully aware of that fact. For a long time people like me have been keeping the world safe from horrible things from outer space, out of time, or out of nightmares. It’s a pretty thankless job, but someone has to do it, and that’s what brought me here, to Arkham, Massachusetts.

  This little college town has been on the government’s radar as a hot spot for the supernatural and unexplainable for decades. It is a stone’s throw away from a nasty little burg called Innsmouth where, or so the stories go, the Feds came face to face with the inhuman horrors that lurk in the deep. Then there was something that happened in another nearby armpit of a town called Dunwich, but I could never find out much about that. The clearance level for those files went beyond my rating. That’s probably because I’m not a shot-caller. I’m a weapon, a trigger to be pulled, and so I’m only told enough to get the mission done, and yes, I’m also comfortable with that. From what I do know about the kind of things I face, I don’t want to know any more about them than I absolutely have to. I’ve had friends (check that, colleagues, I don’t really have any friends) who have learned more about this weirdness than me, and they’re either dead, insane, or just simply gone. Vanished.

  Anyway, both Innsmouth and Dunwich have links to
Arkham, but if that wasn’t enough, there is always good old Miskatonic University. That esteemed center of higher learning has been meddling in things man ought not to mess around with since its founding. I don’t know all the details, but I’ve heard whispers about professors from the university getting involved with a meteorite that fell close by in the 1880s, which killed some people and tainted a large swath of land. There was someone playing Dr. Frankenstein at the university’s medical school back before World War One. Oh, and I can’t forget about their involvement in what would become the Antarctica No Go Zone. Of that last bit I have had some limited firsthand experience, just a small taste of the madness that slumbers at the bottom of the world, and that was more than enough for me.

  So yeah, I wasn’t very happy about being sent to Arkham. The last operative to be sent here ate a bullet after completing his mission, whatever that was. But that was back in the ’90s, so maybe it was just all the depressing grunge music and flannel shirts at the college that was too much for him? Hey, a killer for the government can hope, right?

  As for what I was doing in this lovely town, I was currently sitting in an agency-provided untraceable car on West College Street at nine forty-eight at night. Directly on my left was the Miskatonic University commons, but the parking meter was well fed, and I had a newspaper up in plain view. Anyone passing by would think I’m waiting to pick someone up from the school. Across the street and half a block up was a squat building that had once been a laundromat until it had closed last year. Now there was a flapping banner on its roof with Clear the Air! painted on it. That sign was made for a protest march now two months over, but the true believers who had converted the building into their HQ must have liked it, because there it was, sun-faded and tattered. And I had to admit, it was a nice banner, and I’m not just saying that because I had helped paint it.

  For the last three months I have been playing the part of Lester Parker, ex-Greenpeace, ex-A.L.F., ex-Earth First member. “Les” was a middle-aged ecowarrior looking for the next cause to join, the next way to save the world before mankind could destroy it. Pretty much like the five men and three women who were in the building right now, planning which cell tower they would blow up next. So far this little cabal had downed two cell towers inside Arkham with the detonation cord Mike Hollis had stolen from a construction site. They had enough det cord to take down many more towers, or even something even larger, should they want to.

  Most of the members of the Clear the Air Coalition were good people. They were soccer moms, aging hippies, radical professors, and idealistic college kids. They marched, put fliers up on campus, Tweeted and made YouTube videos. The eight people in the CtAC (c-tac is what they called it with military-like bravado) building tonight were also good folks, but they were angry. They were tired of watching the world go to hell all around them and seeing the government do little to nothing about it. Well, except for falling in line with the corporations, and choosing profits over people time after time. They were the fringe of the fringe, and for the last quarter of the year I, as Lester Parker, had been their friend and accomplice. I ate with them, planned with them, trained with them, got drunk and high with them. Truth be told, I liked them. Hell, I even made love to one of them, Monica, at a beach bonfire party three weeks ago when she had come on to me. That momentary lapse in my professional detachment was partially to keep my cover intact, because who wouldn’t want to sleep with Monica? But yeah, it was also because she was cute and it had been far, far too long for me.

  Hey, don’t judge me. I’ve been very busy, all right?

  So anyway, I believed in what they were trying to do, but not to the extent they did. In a different life I could see myself calling most of the eight in there friends, if I had friends. But as for this life, here and now, none of my feelings would make a damn bit of difference. They were all going to die tonight simply because I was told to do it, and I am okay with that … mostly. Like I said, I only have “borderline” sociopathic tendencies. Sometimes I wish I was full-blown Hannibal Lecter. It would make things so much easier.

  The remote detonator in my lap, the one that would trigger a small C4 charge molded to the building’s gas main, felt so damn heavy.

  I picked up the parabolic microphone from the seat next to me and pointed it out the car’s open window. I switched on the laser mic, and it picked up vibrations on the window glass caused by voices in the room and allowed me to hear what was being said.

  “Where’s Lester?” Monica asked for the third time tonight, and I saw her look through the blinds behind the window the microphone was trained at. She turned her head down both sides of the nearly empty street, her gaze passing over me without noticing.

  I wished she would go outside for a smoke. She was usually like a damn chimney, but naturally, not tonight. I don’t know if her being outside the building when I blew it would save her, but it would give her a chance. I could at least do that for her, couldn’t I?

  “Forget that guy,” George Crossman said. There was no love lost between George and “Les” once he had learned of what Monica and I had done on the beach. The torch that guy was carrying for her was a heavy one. “Where’s Dan?”

  “I told you,” Mike Hollis said. He was the number-two man after Daniel Chang in the small militant arm of CtAC. “Lester called and said he was stuck at work until nine, maybe nine-thirty. He should be getting here any time now. As for Dan, that I don’t know. I’ve called twice but got nothing. But I don’t think either of them would want us sitting around doing nothing but waiting for them to show up. So come on and let’s figure which tower we’re taking down next.”

  The group murmured agreement, and Monica took one last look down the street before turning away from the window.

  I checked my phone for the time; it was nine fifty-three. Lester’s stuck-at-work alibi was running out of time, but I had to wait for Daniel Chang to show up. He was my primary target; the other ecomilitants were secondary. The CIA would like them taken care of, just to be sure, because that’s how the CIA does things, but they weren’t the main threat. It was Dan who had formed the Clear the Air Coalition, and from the thirty-plus members, chose the nine most radical for his special project. No matter what, he had to die.

  But maybe not Monica, a little voice inside my head piped up. I smiled at that pang of conscience. While I was capable of silencing it when I had to, I was glad it was still there, somewhere deep inside me. It made me feel that I was still a little bit human, even after all the things I had seen and done. Her number is in the phone. You could call her, ask her to step outside so you could talk privately. You know she would do it.

  I felt myself nod to no one as I put my phone down on the seat next to me.

  Maybe.

  Yes, despite the radicals’ stance of cellphones and all other modern conveniences clogging up the airwaves with their signals, frequencies, and electromagnetic whatsits, no one didn’t have a cell phone these days. Even good people could be hypocrites, I guess. But hypocrites or not, the eight people in the building were sure that there was an overabundance of technological crap floating in the air that was having a detrimental effect on the world. Cellphones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and wireless connectivity to everything was filling the world with energy that nature never had to deal with before, and things were only getting worse. Now refrigerators could call you up and tell you when you were low on milk. You could control your house’s thermostat while at work through your smartphone, tablet, or computer. People were getting rid of landline phones in increasing numbers because cellphones were cheaper and more convenient. Now every member of a family had multiple phones so that father, mother, granny, little Billy, and sister Susie were always connected. While there was no hard evidence that these signals that went through our bodies every moment of every day had any detrimental effect on people, that didn’t stop the true believers from claiming that was only because the government hid the results of any such studies.

  One thing they could alw
ays point to was the bees. The worldwide lowering of the bee population over the last couple decades was an undeniable fact, and the widely spread theory as to the reason for that was the increasing electronic emissions from all our wireless devices. That, combined with the projections on how the ecology of the entire planet would react should all the bees die off, and it was no wonder people were mad. Something had to be done, and thus the Clear the Air Coalition was born.

  But that didn’t even begin to explain why I was sent to infiltrate, and now exterminate, these “ecoterrorists,” a term my CIA handler always used when discussing them. As I said, I am a specialized killer for the government, an honest-to-god monster hunter. I had been doing that for years now, and since such people are very rare, why send me to stop tree-huggers blowing up cell towers but hurting no one? Where was the sense in that?